I am envisioning a project to measure hockey puck shooting accuracy. My thought was to suspend some kind of rubber mat in the four corners of the net and attach a piezo sensor to each one. When the puck hit the mat it I would get an input voltage.

Has anyone done something like this? My questions are around whether I would be able to differentiate a direct hit vs. say the puck hitting a crossbar and vibrating the whole net, as well as whether I would be able to effectively capture the signal since it would be a single, short-lived pulse (I'm guessing the answer to this one is yes since people seem to use them for measuring pretty high frequency vibrations). I'm also woried about the durability of the sensor.

I'm open to suggestions for other ways to sense the puck. It would first be travelling through a hole roughly 15cm x 15cm, so I thought about some kind of IR sensing but couldn't think of how you would effectively cover an area that big.

Two years ago we had this discussion thread that looks quite useful, it determines the place of impact with microphones but piezo's is also possible.Check - http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,52583.0.html -

Thanks I had considered something like that (or a plate on a hinge with a momentary contact switch of some sort) but thought the piezo route might be more elegant! I had intended to mount it in the corner of the pad where it wouldn't see direct impact from the puck, but I am reading all kinds of things about how fragile the leads are on some of them and to your point that doesn't sound like it would mix well with frozen high-speed rubber.